But as with any challenge, if you give a child enough love, give them some hope and some instruction in something they really care about, kids will surprise you with what they can make happen. I suspect more North Louisiana schools will get in on the action the “problem” is that it really is hard. The Ruston High team I supported (by watching, not by actually lifting anybody) won a national title and a third place. If you are ever in the way, move, or there will not be enough of you left to scrape up and put in a shoebox. My first impressions are that this is much harder than it looks, that toe-touching, basket-tossing and pike-kicking “as one” takes a lot of practice, and that estrogen as a force grows exponentially. What I saw at the Dallas Convention Center over three days were more than 3,000 cheerleaders - 225 teams, give or take a ponytail - competing at the National Cheerleaders Association’s 30th annual championships. This sort of thing has been going on since the 1950s or so but, like the World Football League and disc golf and the Raiders’ move out of and then back to Oakland, I missed the whole entire thing. Last weekend I was exposed to non-exposed cheerleaders, ages junior high to high school, in something called competitive cheering. And no “two bits, four bits” cheering.įor all practical purposes, cheer as our grandparents knew it died that fall nearly 40 years ago, thanks to white patent leather, mid-drifts, and the kinds of cowgirls Roy and Ritter and the Durango Kid sang about wistfully on those long, lonely nights on the prairie, down 10 late to the Redskins and facing third-and-long.īut that’s not the only kind of cheerleading done in Dallas today. We do know that cheerleading was re-invented, big-time, with the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders, who in 1972 eschewed the Eleanor Roosevelt quality of cheer for something a little racier. Skins while cavewomen encouraged them with “a tisket, a tasket, put the rock in the basket,” back when “the rock” really was one.ĭid you know that near Sydney, Australia, they’ve found fossils of pompoms made out of Wooly Mammoth hair? They haven’t, but maybe one day…Just sayin…
Or maybe the cavemen played a game of Hides vs. I imagine a little boy in animal hide shorts surveying the prehistoric prairie and yelling desperately, with a slight Jurassic lisp, “Run, Uncle Ugh! RUN!!!”įinal score? Saber-Toothed Tigers 1, Caveman 0. But cheerleading, in its most primitive form, was here long, long before the football, the game clock, or even Lou Holtz. Logically, you’d think competitive sports would have been invented first. (Ran originally in The Times and The News-Star Sunday, January 16, 2011)
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